The Chilean flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis) is a species of large flamingo at a height of closely related to the American flamingo and the greater flamingo, with which it was previously considered a subspecies before being classified as its own species as a result of their lighter color, smaller size and behavioral differences. The species is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List.
The species breeds in South America from Ecuador and Peru to Chile and Argentina and east to Brazil; it has been introduced into Germany. Like all flamingos, it lays a single chalky-white egg on a mud mound.
These flamingos are mainly restricted to salt lagoons and soda lakes that are vulnerable to habitat loss and water pollution, especially from mining and irrigation which can cause rapid habitat degradation. Young chicks will slowly gain their pink color as pigments called carotenoids from their diet accumulate in their feathers. Chilean flamingos reach sexual maturity at 6 years and have one of the longest lifespans of any bird, living up to 50 years in the wild and up to 40 years in captivity.
Diet
The Chilean flamingo's bill is equipped with comb-like structures that enable it to filter food—mainly algae, plankton, crustaceans, insects, mollusks and other invertebrates—from the water of the coastal mudflats, estuaries, lagoons, and salt lakes where it lives. The species filter feeds with its head upside down in shallow water. The flamingo then uses its muscular tongues to push water in and out of the lamellae on its bill. This allows the flamingo to filter different sizes of food to consume. Because the species feeds upside down, only the flamingo's upper bill can move as opposed to most animals that can only move their lower mandible. Chilean Flamingoes can consume 10% of their body weight every day.
Males and females co-operate in building a pillar-shaped mud nest, and both incubate the egg laid by the female, taking turns to sit on the egg.
In 1988, a Chilean flamingo that lived in the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City, Utah, had mistakenly not received his routine wing clipping. The flamingo escaped, and became known in the Salt Lake area as Pink Floyd the Flamingo. Pink Floyd came to Utah in winter to eat the brine shrimp that live in the Great Salt Lake, and flew north to Idaho and Montana in the spring and summer. Pink Floyd became a popular attraction until his presumed death after he flew north to Idaho in the spring of 2005 and was never seen again.
Since there is such a decline in the numbers of this species, breeding programs have been implemented in zoos to offset the decline of the wild stock numbers.